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Oxford Lieder Festival (4): Ravel, Britten and Berkeley Susan Bickley (mezzo soprano) Julius Drake (piano), Jaqueline du Pré Building, St Hilda’s College, Oxford, 18.10.08 (AO)

Susan Bickley - Picture Courtesy of Robert Gilder & Co.

 

Fresh from her successful Kostelnička in Cardiff last week, Susan Bickley gave this recital for the Oxford Lieder Festival, where she is much loved. Saturday nights, though, are tricky in Oxford, when the locals decamp, home or to London, so this small but loyal audience was made up of true song aficionados. Bickley was in good form. She started with Benjamin Britten’s Three French Folksongs. These were written when he was fourteen, still at school. They are uncommonly sophisticated for a composer whose command of the language was as yet fairly basic. Yet Brittemn instinctively has a feel for the natural span of syntax. Perhaps the most successful song, though, is Fileuse where he’s not constrained at all by words, setting the delightful onomatopaiec refrain “Tirouli, tiroula” like abstract music. It’s a delight, and Bickley has the whimsy just right.

The previous day, Sir Thomas Allen had performed Ravel’s Histoires naturelles at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin. So it was interesting to hear Bickley singing the same, but in a quite different timbre.  The relative lightness of female voice has its pros and cons. Bickley’s Le Grillon leapt about delightfully, while Allen’s Le Paon (the peacock) had greater gravitas. The peacock bridegroom struts its heavy plumage but the peahen doesn’t appear ! It’s good to hear the song from both perspectives. Still more wit was to come with Ravel’s Chansons populaires. These charming songs evoke “national flavour”, Spanish, French, Italian and Hebrew.

The highlight of the evening, though, was Michael Berkeley’s Speaking Silences, in honour of the composer’s 60^th birthday. Before the concert Julius Drake announced that he thought the Berkeley cycle the most significant British song cycle in recent years. Drake should know, he hears them all.  The cycle was originally written for baritone, but Drake likes it so much he asked Berkeley to write it for mezzo-soprano as well. It was premiered in 1995 by Drake and Alice Coote.

Speaking Silence may be new work, but like the Britten and Ravel pieces that preceded it on this programme, it builds on folk tradition. The opening song, Blow, northern wind, blow, blow, is an anonymous, ancient refrain. It gives Bickley delicious vowels to curve her voice around, but the piano part is even more impressive. Drake gets to play tricky, turbulent bell like figures. Indeed the “ghost” of an orchestra is present. The vocal part opens out expansively, like a trumpet, lines rising and spreading at the top of the register. The piano part is endlessly inventive, rippling, boisterous, then quietly understated. It must be a joy to play. Often the voice soars with the most minimal accompaniment – single muted notes like punctuation.  “Come to me in the silence of the night : Come in the speaking silence of a dream”, Berkeley adapts Cristina Rossetti’s mysterious poem.  Then, like a wind instrument, the vocal line returns to rounded vowels, “Speak low, lean low, As long ago, my love, how long ago”.

As Berkeley states in his programme notes, Speaking Silence focuses on “a desire for rest and oblivion” in contrast to his earlier cycle Songs of Awakening Love, written for Heather Harper in 1985. There’s a brief flurry of action in the lively Yeats setting, O hurry where by waters among the trees, making the quiet conclusion more profound. Père du doux rèpos, Sommeil pere du songe comes from an air by the 16^th century French poet Pontus de Tyard. Berkeley is stepping back in time, yet the feeling links to Rosetti. “Viens, Sommeil desiré” is a perfect foil for “Come in the speaking silence”.  Then the windswept refrain returns and the music blows away as breezily as it came. Bickley is one of the leading specialists in new music : she and Drake together were excellent.

The programme ended on a lively note with Britten’s Cabaret Songs, demonstrating that the “folk” tradition lives on in popular song.  These are witty but pointed commentaries on modern life, from the mock heroic Funeral Blues with its downbeat, vaguely jazzy rhythms to the coy Tell me the truth about love. As such they are rather more convincing, and trenchant than Britten’s transcriptions of “real” English folksong, like The Trees they grow so high. That was popular ballad for commercial broadsheets sold in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Many years ago, indeed up to the 1950’s , when people still read music and sang themselves, pop songs were sold in much the same way.

Anne Ozorio


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